Neurological Disorders

Are Animal Models of Parkinson ’ s Disease as Bad as they Seem to Be?

Abstract

Sebastian Rodriguez

“The patient, a forty-two-year-old drug addict, sat frozen and mute, looking more like a mannequin than a man…” So begins Dr. J. William Langston his wonderful story called ‘The Case of the Tainted Heroin’ [1]. Dr. Langston also added an illustrative subtitle: ‘a Trail of Tragedies Leads to a New Theory of Parkinson’s Disease’. What the author recounts in this scientific article (and posteriorly in a book called ‘The Case of the Frozen Addicts’ [2]) is the story of a number of heroin abusers who presented at different emergency rooms with indistinguishable symptoms from those of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the common thread that all of them self-administered ‘synthetic’ heroin contaminated with a meperidine analogue: MPTP . Although 6-OHDA was firstly used to lesion the nigrostriatal dopaminergic system in the rat [3] and to model parkinsonism, the discovery of MPTP as a dopaminergic neurotoxin in the brain (first in humans; then in non-human primates and several rodent species) opened a new era in the use of animals to study PD.